In the news

Count me surprised.

If Mordount calls it quits, has the penny finally dropped?

This is not a poll of opinions for leader, but broadly reflects how the party see Patel. Interestingly, Sunak did well in polls of party members on who would make the best leader despite being near rock bottom in June. If anything, it shows how fickle people are.

I saw a poll a few days ago that showed that Patel would be by far the least popular candidate within her own party if she did actually run.

Mordaunt is pretty much joint favourite at the bookies https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-conservative-leader

Staying absolutely classy to the end, the government denies Labours VoNC (which the government would almost certainly win) as “playing politics”.

I saw a poll a few days ago that showed that Patel would be by far the least popular candidate within her own party if she did actually run.

I don’t get it, are these people cunts or aren’t they? You’d have thought they’d love the whole ‘deport forrins to Rwanda while smirking about it’ thing. Unless there’s something about Ms Patel that the average Tory voter finds utterly off-putting. What could it be?

In more positive news, my thunderer of an MP unsurprisingly did not make the leadership cutoff.

So we are left with the Hateful 8.

She’s always hatin’ and deportin’ and smirkin’ and Tory voters despise that sort of stuff (want to drive my Tory voting relatives to despair? Just say “haitch” they lose their shit completely. Say it with a Scottish accent and you fear for a reenactment of the opening scene from Scanners).

Unless there’s something about Ms Patel that the average Tory voter finds utterly off-putting. What could it be?

It's odd though because the poll above shows pretty strong support for Suella Braverman?

According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/62122985, UK adults still watch over 7 hours of telly a day on average. There's not much detail but presumably means TV programmes rather than including YT/IG etc cat videos.

I find this almost impossible to believe.

It's weekly, see p. 172
https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/annualreport/ara-2021-22.pdf

BBC innit. They’d love to say we all work tv all the time

Or they just subtracted the time people work and sleep from the day and made up the stat

So it is, and it's BBC only. I should write a strongly worded letter about the errors in the article.

The figures were published in the corporation's latest annual report, which also revealed a sharp drop in the time UK adults spend watching TV every day.

Average viewing dropped from eight hours 11 minutes in 2020/21 to seven hours 12 minutes in 2021/22

This feels newsworthy

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The picture is pretty cool. I’d like to see a zoomed in version of each galaxy

This really rustles my jimmies. Politics is literally their job (well, second job for most tories). Same for the opposition to be criticising the government.

Pie on the (sort of) departure of de Pfeffle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKrLBPmRsrM

Felt like a bit of a tactical error from Labour though. If they'd stuck to a "conventional" VoNC on the gov't (without dragging Johnson into it) and actually held the vote they would have made more capital out of it? Particularly as you would have got a meaningful number of Tory rebels.

Yep.

But this will be sold/spun as the government pushing back against a coup/plot that’s intended to thwart democracy and prevent the government from delivering the peoples mandate.

And the Tory base will lap this up, further entrenching division and tribal politics.

But they would have passed up on the chance to hammer a huge rump of MPs for the hypocrisy if voting for/supporting Johnson despite all the resignations due the man’s lack of integrity and serial dishonesty.

This way, they can say that the government are so scared that they weren’t even prepared to put it to debate and a vote - with an 80 seat majority, why are they frit?

Then again, what do I know 🤷‍♂️

But they would have passed up on the chance to hammer a huge rump of MPs for the hypocrisy if voting for/supporting Johnson despite all the resignations due the man’s lack of integrity and serial dishonesty. This way, they can say that the government are so scared that they weren’t even prepared to put it to debate and a vote - with an 80 seat majority, why are they frit?

They deliberately formulated a motion that the government wasn't required* to accept. Therefore, they knew from the start that it would never go anywhere. Feels like they were scared that the Tory party would manage to pull together having carried out the coup.

'*by convention (and we all know how this gov't treats convention)

That could well be right but why do it at all bar ‘playing politics’, obvs.

Despite no tangible evidence, I’m sticking with the line that it could have exposed the MPs who, despite their colleagues publicly denouncing the lying and lack of integrity, clung on to Johnson.

I guess we’ll never know

It’s about risk and reward. The ‘vanilla’ VoNC had a real chance of unseating Johnson early, but carries risk if it fails (wasting valuable Parliamentary time chunter chunter chunter).

The option they went for has basically no risk but also limited reward beyond accusations that gov’t is “frit”

This feels newsworthy

There's something about the "seeing them as they were 13bn years ago" that doesn't sit right with me.

Yes, those photons have been travelling for 13bn years in our subjective time frame, but the notion that we are seeing the galaxies in the past seems to presuppose the notion that there is some kind of universal now.

My knowledge of relativity is not up to knowing the intricacies of this, but it just seems like a fallacy to say that we see those galaxies in the past, in a way that is different from me looking at this mobile phone "now".

Given that the photons that are coming off the screen of my phone took some finite time to travel across the intervening space between the screen and my eyes, I am seeing it in the past too.

By extension, we see everything in the "past", there is no such thing as "now".

Your ‘now’ is collapse of the wave function at the point of observation between all the possible paths from past to future that exist, so in a sense there is no ‘now’, as there are infinite ‘you’s’, each of which could be making the observation at any given moment
Possibly
I am not a physicist but I do love a spot of quantum mechanics

Sitting here ready to get schooled by much smarter people in 5, 4, 3…

I'd ask my wife's uncle for an explainer because he worked as a physicist for the US military in Nevada for 25 years but these days he's more worried about reading the Daily Express and frothing at the mouth at "the immigrants" and "Europe" so fuck that.